Customers demand more of the products and services they use than ever before. They insist that the companies they deal with on a regular basis provide them greater and greater levels of information. These companies are maintaining increasingly larger and larger databases of information about their customers enabling them to deliver higher and higher levels of user satisfaction using that information and implement more robust systems of rewards for their users.
Reward, or affinity, programs provide an additional level of service to a company's most valued customers. By incenting those customers to use more and more of the company's products by providing them rewards, customers maintain longer and stronger relationships with their customers. One of the most widely known example of a reward program is a frequent flyer program. Customers accumulate miles as they fly more and more with the same airline. They can redeem these miles for free flights, first class upgrades and the like. As rewards programs become more prevalently used by other companies, better methods of providing easy access to those rewards are needed.